Note: This page is quite old and is likely out of date. My opinions may have also changed dramatically since this was written. It is here as a reference until I get around to updating it.

Installation

yum install redis -y

Configuration

Default configuration:

############### GENERAL ###############

# Daemonize the Redis process and write out the specified PID file
#
daemonize no
pidfile /var/run/redis/redis.pid

# TCP Listen mode, if bind is not specified it will listen on all available
# interfaces
#
bind 127.0.0.1
port 6379

# Specify the path for the unix socket that will be used to listen for incoming
# connections. There is no default, so Redis will not listen on a unix socket
# when not specified.
#
#unixsocket /tmp/redis.sock
#unixsocketperm 755

# Close the connection after a client is idle for N seconds (0 to disable)
#
timeout 30
tcp-keepalive 5

# Set the log output:
#   debug (a lot of information, useful for development/testing)
#   verbose (many rarely useful info, but not a mess like the debug level)
#   notice (moderately verbose, what you want in production probably)
#   warning (only very important / critical messages are logged)
#
loglevel notice

# Specify the log file name. Also 'stdout' can be used to force Redis to log on
# the standard output. Note that if you use standard output for logging but
# daemonize, logs will be sent to /dev/null
#
logfile /var/log/redis/redis.log

# To enable logging to the system logger, just set 'syslog-enabled' to yes, and
# optionally update the other syslog parameters to suit your needs.
#
syslog-enabled yes

# Specify the syslog identity.
#
syslog-ident redis

# Specify the syslog facility.  Must be USER or between LOCAL0-LOCAL7.
#
syslog-facility local0

# Set the number of databases. The default database is DB 0, you can select a
# different one on a per-connection basis using SELECT <dbid> where dbid is a
# number between 0 and 'databases' - 1
#
databases 16

############### SNAPSHOTTING ###############

# The name of the file to sync the in memory database too.
#
dbfilename database.rdb

# The working directory.
#
# The DB will be written inside this directory, with the filename specified
# above using the 'dbfilename' configuration directive. Also the Append Only
# File will be created inside this directory. Note that you must specify a
# directory here, not a file name.
#
dir /var/lib/redis/

# Compress string objects using LZF when dump .rdb databases? For default that's
# set to 'yes' as it's almost always a win. If you want to save some CPU in the
# saving child set it to 'no' but the dataset will likely be bigger if you have
# compressible values or keys.
#
rdbcompression yes

# Save the DB on disk:
#   save <seconds> <changes>
#
# Will save the DB if both the given number of seconds and the given number of
# write operations against the DB occurred. In the configuration below, the
# database will be saved when any of the following rules are matched:
#
#   after 900 sec (15 min) if at least 1 key changed
#   after 300 sec (5 min) if at least 10 keys changed
#   after 60 sec if at least 10000 keys changed
#
# You can disable saving to disk at all commenting all the "save" lines.
#
save 900 1
save 300 10
save  60 10000

############### REPLICATION ###############

# Master-Slave replication. Use slaveof to make a Redis instance a copy of
# another Redis server. Note that the configuration is local to the slave so for
# example it is possible to configure the slave to save the DB with a different
# interval, or to listen to another port, and so on.
#
#slaveof <masterip> <masterport>

# If the master is password protected (using the "requirepass" configuration
# directive below) it is possible to tell the slave to authenticate before
# starting the replication synchronization process, otherwise the master will
# refuse the slave request.
#
#masterauth <master-password>

# When a slave lost the connection with the master, or when the replication is
# still in progress, the slave can act in two different ways:
#
# 1) if slave-serve-stale-data is set to 'yes' (the default) the slave will
#    still reply to client requests, possibly with out of data data, or the data
#    set may just be empty if this is the first synchronization.
#
# 2) if slave-serve-stale data is set to 'no' the slave will reply with an error
#    "SYNC with master in progress" to all the kind of commands but to INFO and
#    SLAVEOF.
#
slave-serve-stale-data yes

# Slaves send PINGs to server in a predefined interval. It's possible to change
# this interval with the repl_ping_slave_period option. The default value is 10
# seconds.
#
repl-ping-slave-period 10

# The following option sets a timeout for both Bulk transfer I/O timeout and
# master data or ping response timeout. The default value is 60 seconds.
#
# It is important to make sure that this value is greater than the value
# specified for repl-ping-slave-period otherwise a timeout will be detected every
# time there is low traffic between the master and the slave.
#
repl-timeout 60

############### SECURITY ###############

# Require clients to issue AUTH <PASSWORD> before processing any other commands.
# This might be useful in environments in which you do not trust others with
# access to the host running redis-server.
#
# This should stay commented out for backward compatibility and because most
# people do not need auth (e.g. they run their own servers).
#
# Warning: since Redis is pretty fast an outside user can try up to 150k
# passwords per second against a good box. This means that you should use a very
# strong password otherwise it will be very easy to break.
#
requirepass xRDdPoEtcB6DtrRhuMDi1B1TXa0h3hNhxmaFWzruZdFd9hBJnNqzkY0pRY7UVxf5

# Command renaming.
#
# It is possilbe to change the name of dangerous commands in a shared
# environment. For instance the CONFIG command may be renamed into something of
# hard to guess so that it will be still available for internal-use tools but
# not available for general clients.
#
#   rename-command CONFIG b840fc02d524045429941cc15f59e41cb7be6c52
#
# It is also possilbe to completely kill a command renaming it into an empty
# string:
#
#   rename-command CONFIG ""
#
# The following commands are potentially dangerous and they've either been
# renamed if they seem legitimately useful or disabled completely otherwise.
# Most of the commands that have been disabled are configuration options that
# should be specified in this file.

rename-command CLIENT ""
rename-command CONFIG ""
rename-command SLAVEOF ""

rename-command MONITOR ""
rename-command OBJECT ""

rename-command FLUSHALL ""
rename-command FLUSHDB ""

rename-command EVAL ""
rename-command EVALSHA ""
rename-command SCRIPT ""

############### LIMITS ###############

# Set the max number of connected clients at the same time. By default there is
# no limit, and it's up to the number of file descriptors the Redis process is
# able to open. The special value '0' means no limits. Once the limit is reached
# Redis will close all the new connections sending an error 'max number of
# clients reached'.
#
maxclients 128

# Don't use more memory than the specified amount of bytes. When the memory
# limit is reached Redis will try to remove keys accordingly to the eviction
# policy selected (see maxmemmory-policy).
#
# If Redis can't remove keys according to the policy, or if the policy is set to
# 'noeviction', Redis will start to reply with errors to commands that would use
# more memory, like SET, LPUSH, and so on, and will continue to reply to
# read-only commands like GET.
#
# This option is usually useful when using Redis as an LRU cache, or to set a
# hard memory limit for an instance (using the 'noeviction' policy).
#
# WARNING: If you have slaves attached to an instance with maxmemory on, the
# size of the output buffers needed to feed the slaves are subtracted from the
# used memory count, so that network problems / resyncs will not trigger a loop
# where keys are evicted, and in turn the output buffer of slaves is full with
# DELs of keys evicted triggering the deletion of more keys, and so forth until
# the database is completely emptied.
#
# In short... if you have slaves attached it is suggested that you set a lower
# limit for maxmemory so that there is some free RAM on the system for slave
# output buffers (but this is not needed if the policy is 'noeviction').
#
#maxmemory 512Mb

# MAXMEMORY POLICY: how Redis will select what to remove when maxmemory is
# reached? You can select among five behavior:
#
# volatile-lru: remove keys with an expire set using an LRU algorithm (default)
# allkeys-lru: remove any key accordingly to the LRU algorithm
# volatile-random: remove a random key with an expire set
# allkeys->random: remove a random key, any key
# volatile-ttl: remove the key with the nearest expire time (minor TTL)
# noeviction: don't expire at all, just return an error on write operations
#
# Note: with all the kind of policies, Redis will return an error on write
# operations, when there are not suitable keys for eviction.
#
# At the date of writing this commands are: set setnx setex append incr decr
# rpush lpush rpushx lpushx linsert lset rpoplpush sadd sinter sinterstore
# sunion sunionstore sdiff sdiffstore zadd zincrby zunionstore zinterstore hset
# hsetnx hmset hincrby incrby decrby getset mset msetnx exec sort
#
#maxmemory-policy volatile-lru

# LRU and minimal TTL algorithms are not precise algorithms but approximated
# algorithms (in order to save memory), so you can select as well the sample
# size to check. For instance for default Redis will check three keys and
# pick the one that was used less recently, you can change the sample size
# using the following configuration directive.
#
#maxmemory-samples 3

############### APPEND ONLY MODE ###############

# By default Redis asynchronously dumps the dataset on disk. If you can live
# with the idea that the latest records will be lost if something like a crash
# happens this is the preferred way to run Redis. If instead you care a lot
# about your data and don't want to that a single record can get lost you should
# enable the append only mode: when this mode is enabled Redis will append every
# write operation received in the file appendonly.aof. This file will be read on
# startup in order to rebuild the full dataset in memory.
#
# Note that you can have both the async dumps and the append only file if you
# like (you have to comment the "save" statements above to disable the dumps).
# Still if append only mode is enabled Redis will load the data from the log
# file at startup ignoring the dump.rdb file.
#
# IMPORTANT: Check the BGREWRITEAOF to check how to rewrite the append log file
# in background when it gets too big.
#
appendonly no

# The name of the append only file (default: "appendonly.aof")
#
appendfilename appendonly.aof

# The fsync() call tells the Operating System to actually write data on disk
# instead to wait for more data in the output buffer. Some OS will really flush
# data on disk, some other OS will just try to do it ASAP.
#
# Redis supports three different modes:
#
# no: don't fsync, just let the OS flush the data when it wants. Faster.
# always: fsync after every write to the append only log. Slow, Safest.
# everysec: fsync only if one second passed since the last fsync. Compromise.
#
# The default is "everysec" that's usually the right compromise between speed
# and data safety. It's up to you to understand if you can relax this to "no"
# that will will let the operating system flush the output buffer when it wants,
# for better performances (but if you can live with the idea of some data loss
# consider the default persistence mode that's snapshotting), or on the
# contrary, use "always" that's very slow but a bit safer than everysec.
#
# If unsure, use "everysec".
#
appendfsync everysec

# When the AOF fsync policy is set to always or everysec, and a background
# saving process (a background save or AOF log background rewriting) is
# performing a lot of I/O against the disk, in some Linux configurations Redis
# may block too long on the fsync() call. Note that there is no fix for this
# currently, as even performing fsync in a different thread will block our
# synchronous write(2) call.
#
# In order to mitigate this problem it's possible to use the following option
# that will prevent fsync() from being called in the main process while a BGSAVE
# or BGREWRITEAOF is in progress.
#
# This means that while another child is saving the durability of Redis is the
# same as "appendfsync none", that in pratical terms means that it is possible
# to lost up to 30 seconds of log in the worst scenario (with the default Linux
# settings).
#
# If you have latency problems turn this to "yes". Otherwise leave it as "no"
# that is the safest pick from the point of view of durability.
#
no-appendfsync-on-rewrite no

# Automatic rewrite of the append only file. Redis is able to automatically
# rewrite the log file implicitly calling BGREWRITEAOF when the AOF log size
# will growth by the specified percentage.
#
# This is how it works: Redis remembers the size of the AOF file after the
# latest rewrite (or if no rewrite happened since the restart, the size of the
# AOF at startup is used).
#
# This base size is compared to the current size. If the current size is bigger
# than the specified percentage, the rewrite is triggered. Also you need to
# specify a minimal size for the AOF file to be rewritten, this is useful to
# avoid rewriting the AOF file even if the percentage increase is reached but it
# is still pretty small.
#
# Specify a precentage of zero in order to disable the automatic AOF rewrite
# feature.
#
auto-aof-rewrite-min-size 64mb
auto-aof-rewrite-percentage 100

############### SLOW LOG ###############

# The Redis Slow Log is a system to log queries that exceeded a specified
# execution time. The execution time does not include the I/O operations like
# talking with the client, sending the reply and so forth, but just the time
# needed to actually execute the command (this is the only stage of command
# execution where the thread is blocked and can not serve other requests in the
# meantime).
#
# You can configure the slow log with two parameters: one tells Redis what is
# the execution time, in microseconds, to exceed in order for the command to get
# logged, and the other parameter is the length of the slow log. When a new
# command is logged the oldest one is removed from the queue of logged commands.
#
# The following time is expressed in microseconds, so 1000000 is equivalent to
# one second. Note that a negative number disables the slow log, while a value
# of zero forces the logging of every command.
#
slowlog-log-slower-than 10000

# There is no limit to this length. Just be aware that it will consume memory.
# You can reclaim memory used by the slow log with SLOWLOG RESET.
#
slowlog-max-len 1024

############### VIRTUAL MEMORY ###############

### WARNING! Virtual Memory is deprecated in Redis 2.4
### The use of Virtual Memory is strongly discouraged.

# Virtual Memory allows Redis to work with datasets bigger than the actual
# amount of RAM needed to hold the whole dataset in memory. In order to do so
# very used keys are taken in memory while the other keys are swapped into a
# swap file, similarly to what operating systems do with memory pages.
#
# To enable VM just set 'vm-enabled' to yes, and set the following three VM
# parameters accordingly to your needs.
#
vm-enabled no

# This is the path of the Redis swap file. As you can guess, swap files can't be
# shared by different Redis instances, so make sure to use a swap file for every
# redis process you are running. Redis will complain if the swap file is already
# in use.
#
# The best kind of storage for the Redis swap file (that's accessed at random)
# is a Solid State Disk (SSD).
#
# *** WARNING *** if you are using a shared hosting the default of putting the
# swap file under /tmp is not secure. Create a dir with access granted only to
# Redis user and configure Redis to create the swap file there.
#
vm-swap-file /tmp/redis.swap

# vm-max-memory configures the VM to use at max the specified amount of RAM.
# Everything that deos not fit will be swapped on disk *if* possible, that is,
# if there is still enough contiguous space in the swap file.
#
# With vm-max-memory 0 the system will swap everything it can. Not a good
# default, just specify the max amount of RAM you can in bytes, but it's better
# to leave some margin. For instance specify an amount of RAM that's more or
# less between 60 and 80% of your free RAM.
#
vm-max-memory 0

# Redis swap files is split into pages. An object can be saved using multiple
# contiguous pages, but pages can't be shared between different objects. So if
# your page is too big, small objects swapped out on disk will waste a lot of
# space. If you page is too small, there is less space in the swap file
# (assuming you configured the same number of total swap file pages).
#
# If you use a lot of small objects, use a page size of 64 or 32 bytes.
# If you use a lot of big objects, use a bigger page size.
# If unsure, use the default :)
#
vm-page-size 32

# Number of total memory pages in the swap file. Given that the page table (a
# bitmap of free/used pages) is taken in memory, every 8 pages on disk will
# consume 1 byte of RAM.
#
# The total swap size is vm-page-size * vm-pages
#
# With the default of 32-bytes memory pages and 134217728 pages Redis will use a
# 4 GB swap file, that will use 16 MB of RAM for the page table.
#
# It's better to use the smallest acceptable value for your application, but the
# default is large in order to work in most conditions.
#
vm-pages 134217728

# Max number of VM I/O threads running at the same time. This threads are used
# to read/write data from/to swap file, since they also encode and decode
# objects from disk to memory or the reverse, a bigger number of threads can
# help with big objects even if they can't help with I/O itself as the physical
# device may not be able to couple with many reads/writes operations at the same
# time.
#
# The special value of 0 turn off threaded I/O and enables the blocking Virtual
# Memory implementation.
#
vm-max-threads 4

############### ADVANCED CONFIG ###############

# Hashes are encoded in a special way (much more memory efficient) when they
# have at max a given numer of elements, and the biggest element does not exceed
# a given threshold. You can configure this limits with the following
# configuration directives.
#
hash-max-zipmap-entries 512
hash-max-zipmap-value 64

# Similarly to hashes, small lists are also encoded in a special way in order to
# save a lot of space. The special representation is only used when you are under
# the following limits:
#
list-max-ziplist-entries 512
list-max-ziplist-value 64

# Sets have a special encoding in just one case: when a set is composed of just
# strings that happens to be integers in radix 10 in the range of 64 bit signed
# integers. The following configuration setting sets the limit in the size of
# the set in order to use this special memory saving encoding.
#
set-max-intset-entries 512

# Similarly to hashes and lists, sorted sets are also specially encoded in order
# to save a lot of space. This encoding is only used when the length and
# elements of a sorted set are below the following limits:
#
zset-max-ziplist-entries 128
zset-max-ziplist-value 64

# Active rehashing uses 1 millisecond every 100 milliseconds of CPU time in
# order to help rehashing the main Redis hash table (the one mapping top-level
# keys to values). The hash table implementation redis uses (see dict.c)
# performs a lazy rehashing: the more operation you run into an hash table that
# is rhashing, the more rehashing "steps" are performed, so if the server is
# idle the rehashing is never complete and some more memory is used by the hash
# table.
#
# The default is to use this millisecond 10 times every second in order to
# active rehashing the main dictionaries, freeing memory when possible.
#
# Use "activerehashing no". If you have hard latency requirements and it is not
# a good thing in your environment that Redis can reply form time to time to
# queries with 2 milliseconds delay.
#
# use "activerehashing yes" if you don't have such hard requirements but want to
# free memory asap when possible.
#
activerehashing yes

############### INCLUDES ###############
# Include one or more other config files here. This is useful if you have a
# standard template that goes to all redis server but also need to customize a
# few per-server settings. Include files can include other files, so use this
# wisely.
#
# include /path/to/local.conf
# include /path/to/other.conf

Master

Open up incoming connections from the app servers (or the app server network) to port 6379.

Use the default ‘redis.conf’ file in this repository, but change the requirepass to something random and difficult and set masterauth to match the value.

Slaves

Open up incoming connections from the app servers (or the app server network) to port tcp/6379. As well as outgoing connections to the master server on port tcp/6379.

Use the identical config from the master but append the following line to it:

slaveof <master-ip> 6379